Democrats and Republicans should listen to deficit hawks

If the Democrats in Congress want to demonstrate that they are as concerned about the budget deficits and the growing national debt now as they said they were leading up to last November's election, they should reach across the aisle to Republican George Voinovich.
Sen. Voinovich has consistently called for more fiscal discipline from fellow Republicans during the eight years that he has been in the Senate. Unfortunately his warnings were rarely heeded, and sometimes he joined fellow Republicans in voting for budget busters, including once, on the Medicare prescription bill, when the administration lied about the projected cost of the plan.
The Democrats are in charge now, and they say they're committed to fiscal discipline, but the budget that House Democrats submitted last week included healthy increases in spending on education, veterans' health care, homeland security and more. Like most budgets, it has its share of wishful thinking.
Rosy projections
The House plan projects a 153 billion surplus in five years by assuming that all of President Bush's tax cuts will expire in 2010. Republicans didn't make those cuts permanent, because to do so would have kept them and the administration from making the same kind of rosy predictions about future reductions in budget deficits.
While it is unlikely that the Democrats will move to make all Republican tax cuts permanent, it is also unlikely that Democrats have the will or political horsepower to allow all those cuts to expire.
And, meanwhile, neither party has had the will to tackle the looming problem of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is going to begin taking a larger and larger bite out of middle-class income. As it does, there will be more and more political pressure on Congress to rein in the AMT, but no one in Washington knows how that can be done without breaking the budget.
The AMT was enacted as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 and was aimed at the phenomenon of some corporations and super rich individuals who avoided paying any income tax at all. But it was not indexed to inflation, and incomes that defined people as rich in 1970 are now being earned in middle-class, two-income families.
Almost everyone would like to make the necessary adjustments to keep the AMT from becoming a burden on the middle class. But all of the projections that are being used to show a reduction in future budget deficits assume no change in the AMT.
Democrats deserve credit for at lest coming up with a budget this soon. Since 1997, Congress hasn't once met the Oct. 1 deadline for passing its most important budget bills. Iin three of the last five years, the Republican Congress didn't pass a budget at all and the Republican administration was perfectly all right with that.
Reality, Voinovich style
In the Senate Friday, Voinovich was once again making an appeal to both parties for fiscal sanity.
He noted that since he arrived in the Senate, the national debt has increased from 5.6 trillion to 8.6 trillion. That is an increase of more than 50 percent in eight years and the debt now amounts to 29,000 for every American, Voinovich noted. And even under the disingenuous predictions by Republicans and Democrats that a balanced budget is five years away, another 1 trillion could be added to the national debt during those years.
We have expressed concern numerous times not only about the debt, but about the growing amount of the debt that is being held by foreign nations, a byproduct of the obscene trade deficits.
Voinovich gave new numbers and a new perspective: "What is even more concerning, however, is that 55 percent of the privately owned national debt is held by foreign creditors, including the Chinese government -- and that's up from 35 percent from just six years ago."
Voinovich also said this: "Forty years ago, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid accounted for 3 percent of GDP. Today, they're up to 9 percent. And in another 40 years, they'll be up to 18 percent -- equal to total federal revenues and crowding out all other spending."
Voinovich has again sounded the alarm. It is up to this Congress -- and to the Democrats and Republicans who will be seeking the presidency in 2008 -- to respond to that alarm with calls for fiscal discipline and short-term sacrifice if a future economic meltdown is to be avoided.